The other day I purchased, through Amazon, one of those tiny little Asus EEEPC 2G Surf computers. It is very light and tiny, about the size and weight of a trade paperback, but its 7-inch 800x400 monitor is very readable, and, since I have somewhat small hands, I find the small keyboard very much usable.
Out of the box, it is very easy to hook up to Wi-Fi or ethernet for Internet; and to read, edit and create Word and Excel documents in Open Office, etc.
However, for my purposes, there were a few things I needed to be able to make it do in order for it to qualify as a real traveling companion in the place of my Toshiba Windows laptop. I need to be able to not only read email, etc., but also do simple web page editing for maintenance purposes, and also want to be able to use my Sprint EVDO connection. Here's what I added (or found!) to make it all work:
1. I quickly found a link that described how to use the Sprint U720, and after about a fifteen-minute process, had the Sprint device working. I simply call it up through a terminal.
2. There is a need to do some photo editing on occasion when I am on the road, usually only cropping and resizing, but still, best done in a real photo editor. From the WIKI at eeeuser.com, I found a list of repositories for packages that work with the debian - xandros branch of Linux, and had GIMP, the versatile open-source graphics editor, working within minutes (note that I had to use "apt-get install" rather than the somewhat squirrelly Synaptic package handler.. but then, I kind of like command lines).
3. These repositories also included a package for the MySQL Query Browser, which allows me to manipulate databases as needed in the rare case where I am faced with a task that I can't address with the CMS I have built for one of my web sites.
4. A line editor was on my list of things to hunt for, but the kwrite that comes installed on the EEEPC (1) can be made to show line numbers and (2) can be made to highlight ColdFusion markup. It is a very rare occasion indeed that I would have to edit ColdFusion code in my serious "on the road" mode - usually page code is written and tested on the dev box before being loaded on the production server - but it is good to know that it would be easy to read the pages should I need to be able to. (In an "emergency," I suppose a page can be tested on my own server or under a temp name, etc., but I think I have had to do this perhaps once in the last four or five years... almost all the adjusting I do in "road mode" is to content.)
5. Similarly, an FTP client was on my list, but I read that the File Manager on the EEEPC was based on Konqueror, and it turns out that you can open an ftp window through the address bar. I will need another solution, though, for Secure FTP.
All in all, I am pleased to say that my $300 EEEPC will be the computer I take the next time I fly out for a few days. For longer road trips, I would still lug the now-luxuriously-large-seeming Toshiba, or, since space wouldn't be at such a premium, take them both along!
